


X-Files Memorial Hall: Characters Who (Probably?) Won't Be Back for the X-Files Revival Because They Are Dead

by PlaidAdder



Series: X-Files Meta [35]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-01
Updated: 2015-05-01
Packaged: 2018-03-26 15:22:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3855556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder





	X-Files Memorial Hall: Characters Who (Probably?) Won't Be Back for the X-Files Revival Because They Are Dead

One of the first things that went through my mind after the X-Files revival became a reality was: Man, I bet Chris Carter wished he hadn’t killed everyone off in the last two seasons. 

Well, not everyone, of course. And it wasn’t just the last two seasons. But there are a lot of characters who won’t be coming back for…dare we call it Season 10? I guess we dare…because they are dead. 

Well…MAYBE they won’t be back. Because on the X-Files, dead is not necessarily dead. And even when dead is dead, it doesn’t necessarily mean ‘gone.’

Here is a little memorial gallery for all the characters (that I can remember) who have been sacrificed to this show and its insatiable demand for FEELS.

I’m putting this behind a cut tag in case you are not yet ready to feel once more the sensation of having your heart ripped out and cut into tiny pieces.

Let’s remember that the first important character to be killed off in _The X-Files_ was Scully’s dad. Poor bastard didn’t even survive past the opening credits. Episode 13, season 1. Really, this should have been a clue that we should bail while we still had hearts to break.

Good old Deep Throat. First of Mulder’s anonymous informants, first on the chopping block. At least he died in Scully’s arms. However, once again setting a precedent we should have been warned by, Deep Throat’s death did not prevent him from making an appearance in “Blessings Way.”

Not to be outdone, Mulder also loses a father named William, this time in Season Two. Note that in the scene in which Bill Mulder is introduced, the VERY FIRST THING we see him do is light up a cigarette. So actually BOTH of Mulder’s fathers are The Smoking Man.

So this is crazy…I was going over the ep titles for Season 3 and thinking, hm, they didn’t kill anyone in season 3…and then I went, “Holy shit. MELISSA. YOU FORGOT MELISSA.”

And she was the first one that really HURT, too. When the Williams died you were mainly sad for Scully and Mulder. But we got to know Melissa, and although the New Age thing was annoying, she was a good sister to Scully and she helped Mulder avoid losing his soul to rage and despair in “One Breath.” You could be forgiven for coming out of “Blessing Way” thinking damn, Scully has just sacrificed for this quest till she can sacrifice no more.” And you would be WRONG!

I’M NOT CRYING YOU’RE CRYING

Say what you want about Mr. X, he had the most badass death in the whole series. Mortally wounded, he crawled down the hallway to write his last cryptic message to Mulder in his own blood. I really liked X. He was such a bastard to Mulder, and he cleaned up so ruthlessly and with so little regard for ethics or morality…and yet he was still trying to expose these assholes because they were too corrupt and morally bankrupt even for HIM.

Weren’t we all Agent Pendrell, in a way? Nerdy, eager to please, huge and totally hopeless crush on Scully? Such a nice man, and you really felt for him whenever he tried to hit on Scully and failed just by being too much of a dork. I bet he used to fantasize about how red their kids’ hair would have been. And after all that time being someone who could have graced the cover of Nonthreatening Boys Magazine, he dies drunk in a bar holding onto a brace of beer bottles, still eating his heart out over Scully. Who knows, maybe his last thought before expiring was, “It was worth a wound…it was worth many wounds…to know the depth of loyalty and love…” That is one poor bastard who got an extremely raw deal.

They say you should never speak ill of the dead. Therefore I will say nothing.

Season Six was a bad year for the Spender family. Cassandra went up in smoke in “One Son,” and Jeffrey was shot by his father…but apparently only temporarily, as he is exhumed in a really horrifying yet alive form in “William.” Too bad. I was so happy when he was shot. He never added anything.

And the last remaining Mulder family member was sacrificed to season 7′s mid-season arc. Since “Sein und Zeit/Closure” also definitively established that Samantha was dead, I think we can say season 7 was more catastrophic for the Mulders than even season 2.  

But when they killed Krychek–that was when you knew this show had gone terminal. When Chris Carter could no longer see any reason to keep Krychek around, you knew there would be no more conspiracy plot twists, no more consortiums, no more making cryptic pronouncements in darkened rooms while invading Mulder’s personal space. The Krychek Ex Machina was so important to this show’s arc plotting that it really makes you wonder what CC is going to do in Season 10 without him.

Surely the most regrettable deaths on this show, however, were those of Byers, Langley, and Frohicke. Killed off in a weird mess that wasn’t even an “X-Files” episode, really, but rather the conclusion to their ill-starred spinoff series, _The Lone Gunmen._ It always just seemed to me like an unnecessarily harsh treatment of three characters who brought a lot of fun to the show, but really shouldn’t have been given any serious work to do.

But of course the death everyone was always waiting for was this one. C. G. B. Spender. Cigarette-Smoking Man. Cancer Man. That Bastard. Whatever you called him, you wanted him dead; and you had been cheated so many times before. He was shot, apparently fatally, sometime in season 4 or 5; he was back for “Two Fathers/One Son.” He was pushed down a flight of stairs, apparently fatally, in “Requiem.” And then he was revived AGAIN, in an unintentially HILARIOUS scene in “The Truth.” This time, Carter really made an effort to convince us that he’s really most sincerely dead. He is killed by an actual missile fired from a helicopter RIGHT INTO HIS FACE. We see him engulfed by flames. We get a shot of an explosion blowing up in the chamber where he’s hiding. He should be dead. DEAD DEAD DEAD DEAD DEAD.

But if you look at when Cancer Man dies, it tends to be at moments when the show could or maybe should be coming to a close. “Requiem” could have been the show finale–and maybe should have been. “The Truth” was apparently, as far as anyone knew, the last anyone would see of the X-Files. But William B. Davis is still alive. And I don’t know… I’m not 100% sure that Carter won’t drag him out again. I think the conflict between Mulder and Cancer Man became mythic for him, a kind of archetypal center for the whole arc…and I’m not counting him out just yet.


End file.
